Noel Moloney’s New Zealand rally diary

Noel Moloney is contesting the New Zealand Rally Championship alongside Clinton Cunningham in a Skoda Fabia R5.

The first round was Rally Otago on the weekend of April 1 and 2

In his own words, this is how they got on

It was a nice weekend in Dunedin at the Otago rally.

the weather was beautiful there all weekend with a small amount of rain.

ceremonial was Friday Evening in the octagon with lots of people around to start off a good rally after two days of recce.

On the first day of the rally, we started out quite cautious with the fast-flowing roads north of Dunedin with a couple runs over them in the morning, then on to the mountain road –  Dansey’s Pass in the afternoon – what a cool piece of road.

The pace was picking up in the afternoon but, still nowhere near where we wanted to be.

Back to the tarmac stage for the end of the first day posting the seventh quickest stage time – 13th overall after day one.

Back on Sunday, we were five or six kilometres into the first stage of Sunday morning when we got flagged down. The stage was blocked by another competitor so we had a drive-thru got assessed time and then went onto Berwick Forest where we had a moment when we slid off the road and got back out again.

There were a lot of victims on that stage as Sunday progressed on got up to 11th through the day. The second pass over Berwick was cancelled due to an accident – N so on to the last two stages where we set the 10th fastest time and then ran over the last stage holding our 11th place 8th in New Zealand Rally Championship  and seventh in the Asian Pacific Championship

A lot of learning was done this weekend ON the fast roads – you need to be on your A-game.

For Clinton’s first time, it was good to get a finish in a respectful number that was our goal going down there in the first place.

So now we focus to rally Whangārei for round two and the good-cambered roads of the North Island.

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